RETURN TO ALL
As published in NZHerald today: Click to read
Never Again Is Now, And New Zealand Cannot Look Away
I went to bed last night to news no Jewish person should ever receive: families gathered to celebrate Chanukah - the festival of light - were attacked, many fatally, simply for being Jewish.
At the iconic Bondi Beach, gunfire shattered a moment of ritual and joy. As Jews around the world lit the first Chanukah candle, repeating a practice that has carried us through centuries of persecution, the ancient promise that light endures was met with mass murder.
Our hearts are broken. We hold those directly affected in our hearts, knowing that this attack has struck at something fundamental: the right to live freely, gather in peace, and practise your faith undaunted.
The reverberations reach us here in Aotearoa New Zealand.
New Zealanders understand what it means to want your kids to be safe at the beach, at a public event, or at a community celebration. When a Jewish gathering is targeted anywhere in the world, Jewish people everywhere, including here, receive the same chilling message: we are unsafe simply for being who we are.
If we needed it, this is a stark reminder that antisemitism is not a relic of history. It is here. It is growing. It is increasingly normalised. And, as Bondi showed so brutally, it can turn deadly.
Jewish communities in Australia and New Zealand have been forced into heightened vigilance. We now require heavy security around places of worship and community events. I have MC’d Chanukah in the Park events in New Zealand over the years, public events just like the one in Bondi. We don’t hold them anymore. We can’t. Let that sit with you.
Threats and fear shrink public life, stifle diversity, and steal what should be ordinary, joyful moments.
Across our cities and online, at protests or in the comments section of a social media video, we have witnessed an escalation in hateful, dehumanising rhetoric. Old and new antisemitic conspiracies proliferate, while signs with slogans like “Globalise the Intifada” have become disturbingly common. These will be heard by some, not as calls for peaceful resistance, but as incitement to spread violence beyond the Middle East, to target Jewish communities everywhere.
Other slogans, “throw out the trash,” “death to Zionists”, continue the same pattern of dehumanisation. And dehumanisation, we know, is a permission structure: the gateway through which hatred passes into harm.
It should alarm every New Zealander that in 2025, eighty plus years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Jewish children in our own country are being assaulted, threatened, and taught to hide who they are. Jewish sites are vandalised. Jewish New Zealanders feel unsafe, and increasingly isolated.
This is not an abstract overseas trend. It is the lived reality captured in the latest report on antisemitic offences in Aotearoa New Zealand, which shows a sharp rise in incidents. It sits alongside the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service’s warning that we are facing “the most challenging national security environment of recent times.”
Some will insist this has nothing to do with us, that it is simply a spill-over from overseas conflict. But when a New Zealand child is punched for wearing a kippah, when Jewish people are threatened in broad daylight, when Jewish students must hide Jewish symbols, or avoid public conversation about their identity to feel safe, then this is undeniably our issue.
The Holocaust Centre of New Zealand exists to ensure we never forget where hatred can lead. But remembrance alone is not a shield. The Holocaust did not begin with the gas chambers or the murder of six million; it began with words, stereotypes, conspiracy theories, and the erosion of empathy. It began when ordinary people stopped seeing their Jewish neighbours as fully human.
What we are seeing in New Zealand today is not the Holocaust. But it reflects the same underlying currents: fear, misinformation, scapegoating, social division, and the normalisation of hate. If we fail to respond with clarity and purpose, those currents will continue to strengthen.
That is precisely why Holocaust Centre of New Zealand matters. Education is not a luxury; it is an essential pillar of national resilience. By equipping young people, teachers, and communities with the tools to recognise prejudice before it hardens into behaviour, we strengthen New Zealand’s broader efforts to prevent radicalisation, counter misinformation, and support social cohesion.
The announcement that the draft national curriculum will include mandatory Holocaust education is therefore not merely symbolic, it is a safeguard. We are giving young people the historical understanding and the moral confidence to recognise prejudice, challenge lies, and confront hate head-on.
This is not about thought-policing or choosing sides in international conflicts. It is about the wellbeing of children and communities in Aotearoa New Zealand. Bondi Beach should have been a place of light, laughter, and community. Instead, it became our warning. If we dismiss the flashing warning lights as distant or irrelevant, we risk learning its lesson too late.
Never again is now.